Recently, wireless communication systems based on decentralized architectures have gained much interest given their level of flexibility and user convenience. In such architectures, wireless devices may establish connectivity and communicate directly with each other, by virtue of proximity-based communications, without having to route messages or control information through a centralized network controller. To achieve this, wireless devices are configured with a device-to-device (D2D) discovery feature that enables a wireless device to publish its service information and/or discover other similarly-equipped wireless device service information, so that wireless devices are aware of available services within a certain vicinity.
However, when a wireless device publishes and/or discovers available services within its proximity, the D2D discovery process broadcasts service information with the MAC address of the wireless device. In so doing, other devices within the proximity of the wireless device may be capable of “listening in” to the broadcasted service information and may store the MAC address and service information of the received service information frames. As such, there exists the possibility that wireless devices may be tracked if a single fixed MAC address is used for the D2D discovery process.